In this first installment of Makers — a series showcasing how professionals solve problems together across crafts at Huge — we brought together Group Creative Director Cavan Huang and VP of Strategy Andre Souza to talk about their work for Planet Fitness. Both have been instrumental in unlocking new growth and improved user experiences for the 18-million-member international gym franchise. The Planet Fitness app is the number 1 free health and fitness app in Apple’s store, has already attracted 2.3 million new users in one year, and generated an 83% increase in workout sessions.**
The Makers.
Andre Souza: I’ve been at Huge since 2015. When I joined, my goal was to help our experience design at the time and to think about product strategy, data, and business. Since then I’ve changed countries — started in Brazil, and moved to the U.S. — and most of the time I've been working with designers and creatives by trying to help them frame problems: How do we evaluate success? How do we get a sense that we have achieved success? And how can we be on the same page about the problem we’re solving?
Cavan Huang: I've been at Huge Brooklyn for almost three years. I joined right during the pandemic, and was very excited about the possibility of working with top talent. That’s what I find amazing about Huge: everybody is multi-talented and wears many hats — super creative, but also super strategic. Fortunately for me, when I joined, Planet Fitness was one of the clients that fell into our laps. So I've been on that account since the very beginning. And we built a small but nimble super team to help solve these experience problems.
The partnership.
Cavan Huang: The thing that I’ve longed for in my career, in all types of agencies, is a strategic partner who can bounce ideas — help make me a better creative and vice versa. And I haven't found many like that. Finding partners is a hard thing to do because sometimes the traditional model of agencies either leans too heavily on strategy; where strategy leads everything and then creative follows; or it's so heavily based on creative that strategy doesn't have any voice and it's an afterthought. It’s developed in silos, one followed by the other, and I think that's the wrong way of working. I’ve been fortunate to have a few amazing strategic partners on Planet Fitness, including Andre Souza and Chris Tanabe, who manages the product stream.
